


Anger

by AconitumNapellus



Series: Hung [5]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 05:19:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13606374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: Illya is recovering from his double shoulder dislocation, and he is angry about everything.Another (yes, another) instalment in the 'Hung' series, because I wanted to write about Illya's anger. I'm not so happy with this, but here it is. I like bits of it.[EDITED to include a new section.]





	Anger

Illya feels as though he’s been in pain for so long that it’s breaking him apart. He is like a wasp trapped in an empty jar, aimless but full of anger, butting himself against the glass in fury, trying to escape something inescapable. He sleeps badly and he wakes up mad, and he’s madder still because he can’t do anything to help himself. He has to wait for Napoleon to help him with the toilet and help him dress and get him breakfast and feed him his food. Then he has to wait for Napoleon to drive him in to Headquarters for counselling. He has to rely on the psychiatrist to open and close the door for him, so while he’s in there he’s trapped. Then he moves on to the physical therapist, and after the psychiatrist has tried to crack his mind apart the physical therapist starts on his body.

He’s used to Napoleon easing clothes off and back on by now. He’s used to Napoleon washing him in the shower and gently drying him off with the hairdryer around his arms, and with rough little buffs of the towel everywhere else. It just doesn’t matter any more. But it’s different when he walks into the physio room and the healthy, smiling, solid physiotherapist carefully unstraps his slings and unbuttons his shirt for him and peels it from his arms.

‘I guess that hurts,’ she says as she slips the sleeve off his wrist, and he snaps, ‘Of course it hurts.’

Of course it does. Everything hurts. Everything is agony. He’s so tired and he’s so tired of pain.

‘All right, I want to see what movement you’ve got in your left arm,’ she says. ‘Now, can you ease it forward a little?’

He tries to swing his arm forward, awkwardly, stiffly. He feels like a painted soldier with wooden joints; but painted soldiers wouldn’t feel pain, and there is so much pain. Painted soldiers would be able to rotate their arms all the way round and back again, and would carry on staring with painted eyes. Their painted mouths would be fixed in an expression of grimness, and there would be no pain at all.

‘I can’t,’ he says, and there are tears in his eyes. He feels so exposed whenever he’s here, so on the spot, always being asked to do things that he just can’t manage.

‘Now, we could do with loosening up the joints a little,’ she says, as if she thinks he isn’t trying, as if she thinks he doesn’t want to get better.

‘ _ We _ ?’ he retorts icily.

Why does everyone resort to using the first person plural with him, as if as soon as a man suffers an injury he becomes a kind of common property belonging to everyone who interacts with him? As if he’s become a child?

‘Why don’t you sit on the bed?’ she asks him.

She must be used to cranky patients, he’s sure, but her lack of reaction to his coldness just makes him feel even more angry. He backs to the bed and settles himself on the faux leather surface. It’s just a little too high to be easy to get onto without the use of his arms, and as his feet swing above the floor he has such an awful feeling, a sudden, swooping memory. Hanging, nothing under his feet, the pain inhabiting him like tiny, vicious creatures in every joint and muscle. For a moment he can’t breathe, and although his eyes are open he isn’t seeing the physio room, and although the woman is talking to him he can’t hear her words.

She’s saying something, she won’t stop talking, won’t stop talking, and suddenly he is shouting something at her, but he doesn’t know what, doesn’t even know what language he’s using, because he’s so consumed with – whatever this is, with this terrible feeling, this fear, this enveloping memory of the horror of hanging – that he can’t stop himself, can’t control his words.

It’s only when he registers the real fear on her face that he is shocked into silence. She couldn’t have understood his words. It’s doubtful that she understands any Ukrainian, let alone the crudest Ukrainian that he has. But even stripped to the waist and dosed on painkillers and with two arms useless, apparently he is frightening when he’s angry.

He’s breathing hard, and she is standing on the other side of the room, and he feels dizzy, his shoulders searing, his mind reeling.

‘I am sorry,’ he says, managing now to speak in English, although his accent is thick.

His hands are resting limply on the cool smoothness of the bed and he concentrates on the feeling of that faux leather through the backs of his loosely curled fingers. He wishes he could grip onto the bed, because he feels as if for a moment the tether connecting him to reality snapped, and he drifted away into the terrible world of memory.

‘I think – we had better schedule physiotherapy on a different day to counselling.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’

And then, in a display of professionalism that awes him even through his pain and mental haze, she steps forward again and says, ‘I want you to spend a little time squeezing these rubber balls, just to keep the movement up in your hands. Your right too. I know it’s very painful to move your shoulders, and it will be painful doing this, but it will help in the long run. All right, Mr Kuryakin?’

‘All right,’ he says, although everything seems so far away from all right, and he takes the balls that she touches against his useless hands, and tries to squeeze.

  


((O))

  


Afterwards, Napoleon is waiting for him. He walks out of the physio room and a nurse kindly opens the doors which separate the Infirmary from the rest of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters, and Napoleon is there, just coming around the corner of the corridor with two cups of coffee in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

‘Let you out early for good behaviour?’ Napoleon asks with a grin as he reaches him.

Illya feels exhausted, and still prickly with an anger that has no real focus. His mind feels like a soup, like a great vat of things which keep being stirred and stirred without giving him a moment’s rest. His shoulders are searing so badly that he doesn’t know how he can bear it. He can’t think of a comeback to Napoleon’s words, either jovial or biting or just mundane. There’s nothing. Nothing at all.

‘All right, IK,’ Napoleon says, and his voice is full of understanding. He puts his hand lightly against Illya’s back, the one with the paper bag in it, and the paper rustles, a nasty little noise in his ears, and although Napoleon’s hand is a comfort he wants to snap at him to stop making that awful noise.

‘In here,’ Napoleon says, and he steers Illya into one of the agents rooms. ‘Come sit down.’

Illya blinks at the little bed in there. Napoleon must have been through the other rooms and collected all the pillows that he could find, because there is a little nest of pillows arranged at the head end of the bed. Napoleon knows that after these sessions Illya needs to rest, and knows he can’t drink coffee lying down, and knows that it hurts to lean against the wall or the straight back of a chair.

Illya gives a thin smile through the tiredness and pain and he sits down on the bed and rests back into the pillows. The pillows make it bearable, but the pain is running through everything, through every nerve and muscle and bone. Napoleon puts the coffee and the paper bag down and pats his hand lightly at Illya’s pocket, and draws out his little bottle of painkillers.

‘It must be time for another dose, yes?’ he asks, opening the lid and shaking out two pills. There’s already a cup of water by the bed. He has arranged all of this. ‘Open up,’ he says, and when Illya opens his mouth he slips the pills in and lifts the water to his lips.

‘Now, coffee, and a little something to eat,’ Napoleon says.

Illya feels sick with tiredness. He’s not sure if he feels up to even the effort of chewing. Napoleon lifts the coffee cup up to his mouth and he sips, and then hisses because it’s too hot. His little flinch of reaction makes his shoulders ring with pain, and he snaps, ‘For God’s sake, Napoleon.’

‘A little hot, huh?’ Napoleon asks, not rising to his sharpness. ‘I’m sorry.’

He just pours a little cold water into the cup and stirs it in with a pen, and Illya forces himself not to say something about not wanting ink in his coffee.

‘That should be better. Do you want a bite of your pastry?’

‘I’m too tired,’ Illya mutters, and Napoleon says, ‘Now, now. Some sugar will do you good.’

There’s sugar in the coffee too. Napoleon is doing all he can, Illya knows, but he is so tired and he wants to unload his anger somewhere.

‘I’m not a six year old child,’ he says.

‘No,’ Napoleon replies, opening the paper bag and drawing out something flaking and fragrant and sticky with sugar. ‘You’re a crochety thirty-something U.N.C.L.E. agent and you need to eat. Now open up.’

The scent of the pastry is so good, despite the tiredness and the pain. It smells of apricot and flaked almonds, and when Napoleon waves it under his nose he opens his mouth. Napoleon seizes the opportunity and pokes a little inside, and Illya bites and chews. Chewing hurts, but the taste is good, and his mouth floods with saliva.

‘Did you shout at the physiotherapist again?’ Napoleon asks.

Illya chews and swallows, and Napoleon dusts the side of his mouth with his handkerchief.

‘Only a little,’ he says.

‘Ah,’ Napoleon replies. He lifts Illya’s coffee so he can take a mouthful, and the temperature is perfect. ‘I heard rumours of a Soviet explosion. Those rooms have thin walls, you know.’

‘And all the nurses immediately call you up to tell you about it?’ Illya asks rather acidly.

‘All the nurses are concerned for you,’ Napoleon says gently. ‘They warned me you might need some sugar and a comfortable bed. They thought the physio might need a stiff drink, too, but I guess they’re looking after her.’

‘Hmm,’ Illya replies, because he did need some sugar and he did need a comfortable bed, and he can’t really get at Napoleon for providing that. There is a little net around him made up of medical professionals, with Napoleon there watching over it all, and they rarely allow him to fall too far.

‘I need to sleep,’ he says, because sleep is the only thing that Napoleon hasn’t mentioned. It’s the only thing he can vaguely pull out to pick at.

‘Then you are in luck, _mon cher_ ,’ Napoleon tells him, ‘because I have a couple hours of work to complete, so when you’ve finished your snack I will tuck you up in here like Goldilocks in Baby Bear’s bed, and you can sleep. I even have the tablets to help you get under. I’ll sit here and work while you sleep, and then I’ll take you home.’

It’s impossible to be angry. The sugar and the coffee and the love have all helped to ease away the terrible black bile. He leans against the soft pillows and accepts another bite of his pastry and another mouthful of coffee, and Napoleon’s smile is like the sun.

  


((O))

  


All he wants is a drink of water. It should be so simple. There is the sink in front of him. There is the tap. Napoleon, of course, has put all the crockery neatly away, and the glasses are up in a cupboard. He can barely move his arms to the height of the tap let alone the cupboard up above the counter. But he can see the glasses there, behind the glass panel in the cupboard door. He just wants a drink of water, and he could call Napoleon to get it, but he’s so sick of calling Napoleon for simple little things. He’s sick of being wiped like a baby when he uses the toilet, fed like a baby when he eats, put down in bed like a baby and dressed and undressed like a baby. He’s sick of having to let Napoleon brush his teeth and shave him and comb his hair for him and wipe his face for him when it’s dirty.

He wants to take his left arm, his unbroken arm, from his sling and reach up to the cupboard for a glass, but the thought of the pain scares him. That’s so ridiculous. He’s already in so much pain, but the idea of an increase in pain scares him. He looks at the cupboard and the thought of lifting his arm makes sickness twist in his stomach. He looks at the tap and mentally goes through the motions of reaching across the sink and closing his half-numb fingers on the metal, and turning it. He doesn’t even know if he could turn that tap. The thought of it makes him wince.

He just wants water. Just a glass of water.

He lifts his foot and he kicks the floor cupboard so hard that his shoe drives through the thin tongue and groove boarding. Then he’s stuck there, his foot through the hole, his shoe stuck against the splintered wood, the door just flapping when he tries to pull it out. He’s so afraid of unbalancing himself in his attempt to get free. He’s afraid of crashing to the floor and not being able to put his arms out, and his shoulders slamming onto the tiles.

‘Napoleon,’ he calls, but there’s no reply. He steadies himself, leaning his hips against the counter, and raises his voice to a seaman’s roar, throwing his anger and pain and bitterness into that sound. He shouts, ‘ _ Napoleon! _ ’

It’s a sound that makes his own ears ring. Then Napoleon is standing in the doorway to the kitchen and at first he looks concerned, but then he’s coming across the room with a definite twitch at the corners of his mouth.

‘Get me out of here,’ Illya grates, and Napoleon says, ‘It serves you right for breaking my cupboard,’ and steps back quickly towards the door as Illya glares.

‘Just – get – me – out,’ Illya tells him, staccato and furious.

Napoleon comes back across the kitchen, the twitching of his mouth breaking into a grin. It’s obvious he’s struggling to suppress laughter as he bends and slips Illya’s shoe from his foot and carefully eases the appendage out of the ragged hole.

‘Well, I always thought there should be more ventilation under one’s sink,’ he says, straightening up and presenting Illya with his shoe on his open hand, like Cinderella’s prince.

Illya wishes he could throw the thing. He’s shaking with anger that he has so little outlet for. He can’t punch anything, can’t strike out, can’t break out of the apartment and work out his adrenaline by running or martial arts or swimming. He twists away from Napoleon, knocking his hand with his arm, knocking the shoe to the floor. The pain lances through him with such fierceness that his ears sing and blotches fill his vision, and he’s suddenly kneeling, swaying. Napoleon’s hand is broad and firm against his back and he is saying, ‘That’s it. Just lie down there for a moment. All right. Illya, are you going to be sick? Do you feel like you’re going to be sick?’

His back is against the smooth tiles. He’s lying down. His mouth has flooded with saliva and his stomach is churning and there’s such a high pitched whistling in his ears, and he doesn’t know if he’s going to be sick or not. Everything fades out, but it must only be for a moment because when it comes back Napoleon is saying, ‘I don’t want to have to roll you onto your side.’

The thought of that makes the sickness surge but makes him fight harder to control it too. Napoleon is pulling a low box out of the under sink cupboard and putting it under Illya’s legs.

‘All right, IK,’ Napoleon says, his voice very gentle but still very far away. ‘Take it easy. You’re staying down there until you feel better.’

Illya lies, the tiles cool and hard beneath him. Napoleon folds a towel into a thin pad and slips it under his head. He remembers lying on the floor in that château, the intricate, flaking, water-damaged plaster ceiling high above him, his eyes drifting over rich plaster bunches of grapes, vines, leaves, and stags. He had been in such a dizzying hell of pain, surrounded by the stench of his own shit, his shoulders screaming, and Napoleon had put his legs up on a box then too. Had he been fainting then?

Napoleon has been out of the room for a moment, and when he comes back he lifts Illya’s legs again and puts a cushion between them and the hardness of the box. He stares up at Napoleon’s plain kitchen ceiling and the light fitting just above him, and the line of bright sunlight cutting through the window and across the flatness above him. He is swallowing the saliva that keeps coming into his mouth and trying to push away the awful faintness and sickness, and trying not to feel as though the world were spinning around him.

‘I can get up,’ he tries to say, and Napoleon says, ‘Not until you’ve got some colour back in your face. You look like wallpaper paste. Anyway, what’s wrong with my kitchen floor? I paid a lot for these tiles.’

Illya closes his eyes because he feels a razor’s edge from tears. Napoleon doesn’t need to see that. He doesn’t need to see him breaking down again. But he remembers lying on the floor in the château, remembers gazing up at the ceiling rose and the central point where there was a hook and broken chains, and he remembers the terrible, terrible, unending hanging by his arms.

There. He’s crying, tears spilling through his closed eyelids and running down over his ears and into his hair. That awful time of hanging feels so close it’s like a ghost pressing over his body, weighing him down, filling every part of him. It’s just too much. It’s just too much to take.

‘Do you need anything, Illya?’ Napoleon asks softly, and he says, ‘A drink. Just a drink of water.’

  


((O))

  


Yet another counselling session, yet another hour of sitting in that little panelled room and talking and talking and talking until his mind feels as if it’s been turned inside out and he’s shaking and exhausted. They were kind enough when he stumbled into the commissary to give him his coffee with a straw in it, and tactful enough not to offer to hand feed him. But he’s hungry. He sits at the table and eyes the pastries and cakes under their glass domes on the counter, and he wants so badly to have something to eat. It’s always exhausting going through the counselling, and afterwards he’s always hungry and tired and feels as if his nerves are frayed to shreds. He’s sore, too, because it’s past time for his painkillers, but there’s no one here he feels he could ask to put the painkillers in his mouth any more than he could ask to hand feed him a piece of cake.

He leans back in his chair. He feels white with exhaustion. The straw allows him to sip the coffee but leaning forward to it makes his shoulders hurt and straightening up again makes his shoulders hurt. He sits there and somehow everyone around him seems to be in a different place, as if he has moved onto a slightly altered plane of reality. They are all moving around behind a glass plate, their voices muffled, their movements slow and detached from reality. The only reality is the ache and throb in his shoulders and the tight ache across his forehead and through his jaw, and the feelings that are churning like laundry in a machine inside his mind.

He thinks about easing an arm from a sling and trying to open the bottle of painkillers, but he knows he can’t open the bottle. He’s tried before, and he can’t get his half-numb fingers to grip on the lid. He can’t properly hold small things like pills. He can hardly lift his hand to his mouth. It’s ridiculous that those pills are there inside his jacket, in his inside pocket, and he can’t move them the few inches from the outside of his body to the inside of his body.

He closes his eyes and wills the pain and the aching to subside. Of course that doesn’t work. Sometimes you can divorce yourself from pain for a while, but not when the pain is there all the time, and has been there for days and days and days.

Perhaps the caffeine will help. He opens his eyes again and bends his head towards the straw in his cup of coffee. He sips, and it isn’t enough. He can’t get enough coffee through the straw. He wants a proper, hot, rich mouthful. Is that so much to ask? To just be able to enjoy a cup of coffee after the gruelling counselling?

‘Oh, Mr Kuryakin, are you okay?’

He blinks his eyes open again, and to his fury tears are spilling down his cheeks. One of the girls from Communications is standing there looking down at him with such a sickly expression on her face. For a moment he can’t even remember her name.

The fury surges over him like a winter wave. He’s so fucking tired of all of this.

‘Of course I’m not okay,’ he snaps, and her change of expression somehow fuels the anger.

He stands up, kicking his chair backwards. It clatters over onto its back and scuds across the floor, clattering into other chairs, where a couple of agents stand up, raising their arms, making little protests. He kicks at the table, but the table is bolted to the floor, and the force of the kick rebounds through his foot and leg. Just enough energy gets through that the cup on the table shudders and slops coffee all over the surface, but it’s maddening that he can’t kick the table right over onto its side.

‘Of  _ course _ I’m not okay,’ he snaps again, shrieking really, his voice becoming something beyond his recognition. Everyone is staring. Everyone has stopped what they’re doing, and they are all staring. ‘Have you got  _ any _ idea – ? I am in  _ pain _ all the time. It never stops hurting. It never – ’

He’s breaking down. God. The tears are streaming down his face, and he’s stumbling backwards to the wall. If he were an animal he would retreat into a den and tear at himself with his teeth and claws. He doesn’t know what’s coming out of his mouth through the tears and the anger, and he’s aware of faces staring at him and hands reaching out, but everything has become a whirl, a terrible vortex. He hits backwards into something. The corner of some shelves are just at that awful height, just at the height to stab into his shoulder. The pain is an explosion. His head is suddenly swimming, his eyes full of singing psychedelic colours, and then he’s in a strange position as if he’s slithered down the wall, and he’s vomiting weakly. People are crouched around him, reaching out to him, and he spits bits of vomit from his mouth and sobs, ‘Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.’

He can’t bear them to touch him. They’ll touch his shoulders, and the pain will only grow worse.

‘All right,’ someone says in a gentle voice, but a voice of such firmness that it cuts past everything else. ‘All right, back off, everyone. This isn’t a sideshow.’

It’s Freddie, Freddie who stands behind the counter and serves everyone their food and drinks. He’s crouching in front of Illya in his white cap and apron, and he’s brushing very lightly at the sick on his jacket with a cloth. Illya is so dizzy that he can’t do anything. He wishes he were lying down, but he can’t make himself move.

‘You’ve got painkillers?’ Freddie asks.

‘Inside pocket,’ Illya says.

He can still see the eyes on him in his peripheral vision. People are still watching. He could curl away and die. What a scene he has made. He is flushing hot and cold and he’s not sure if it’s the faintness or the embarrassment.

‘All right,’ Freddie says, then he tilts his head round again and says, ‘Come on now, the Commissary’s closed for ten minutes. Angela, will you get me a glass of water? Hey, Greg, phone through to the Infirmary, will you?’

The space is being cleared. They’re reluctant to leave, but they leave, the women looking down at him with worried expressions, the men worried too, but trying more to hide it. They’re all just concerned, of course, but it’s mortifying. It would be more mortifying if his mind weren’t so full up with pain and faintness.

Freddie receives that glass of water and gets Illya’s pills and checks the label. He opens up the bottle and puts two into Illya’s mouth, then lifts the glass of cold water to his lips and says, ‘There you are, Mr Kuryakin. No, drink as much as you want. There’s more in the faucet.’

He drinks and drinks. Of course the pain doesn’t go right away. It takes time for the painkillers to work. The water helps, though. It cleans out that dreadful taste of stomach acid in his mouth, even though the smell of it is all around him.

‘Can you move, Mr Kuryakin?’ Freddie asks him. ‘There’s a clear space on the floor over there and you’d be better lying down.’

‘I don’t want to move,’ he murmurs, although he wants to lie down very much. His head is spinning and he’s afraid the water he drank is going to come up again. It’s a horrible feeling, that looming sense that his stomach is about to lurch and spew everything up through his mouth.

‘If you can just come sideways a bit,’ Freddie says.

Illya snaps, ‘I  _ don’t _ want to move,’ but Freddie is moving him anyway, supporting him and moving him so he can lay his back down on the floor. Freddie might have been an agent once, he thinks. He doesn’t know much about him. He doesn’t let on much about his past. But Illya is sure he hasn’t always run a commissary. There’s something about him that makes him think he might have been an agent once.

As soon as his head is down the dizziness starts to ease, even though moving hurt a lot. He lies looking up at the ceiling. He seems to be spending a lot of time looking up at ceilings at the moment. He hears the door open and the familiar voice of one of the doctors saying, ‘Ah, our most popular patient. You’ll be glad to know I’ve got something in my office that could knock out a horse. How do you feel about coming down to the Infirmary and trying it out?’

The idea of something that could knock out a horse is appealing.

‘I don’t know if I can walk,’ he says honestly as the doctor kneels down at his side.

‘I brought a wheelchair. Let your friendly family doctor do the pushing. Spend some time in a good soft bed, and spare your co-workers for a few hours, why don’t you?’

Illya stares at the ceiling and tries to contain his mortification at having broken down so utterly in front of ten or more people, and at the prospect of being pushed through the corridors in a wheelchair with sick on his clothes. The promised sleep will be worth it, perhaps. It is the prize at the end of the ordeal. He sighs out breath, and says, ‘Okay. Thank you. Where’s the chair?’

  


((O))

  


‘Damn damn damn damn _damn_!’

Napoleon holds himself back for a moment, allowing himself to be amused at the sight of Illya, mad as a hornet, standing in the kitchen naked but for his slings and staring at the pool of milk that’s sluggishly widening over the floor. His left arm is out of its sling, hanging uselessly at his side. His right is still strapped across his chest. The trapezius muscles that steady his scapulae, the line of his spine, the firm rounds and dimples of his buttocks, make a little spark in Napoleon’s groin, even though there is still green-yellow bruising spreading around and down from Illya’s shoulders that reminds him of how much pain he must be in.

It was only a few nights ago that suddenly all of that deep intimacy and odd tension between them unfolded into such a wonderful thing; into words like ‘I love you,’ and then into such hot and needful actions. It was such a privilege to finally be able to inhale the scent of Illya’s sex and to touch the heat of his cock sheathed in thin, mobile skin, to take him into his mouth and taste him and bring him to orgasm with nothing but his tongue and cheeks and lips. It’s such a privilege to be able to stand behind him in the kitchen and admire his naked form without feeling as though he’s doing something wrong.

Napoleon steps silently across the room, taking advantage of Illya’s haze of anger and his own skill at creeping, so he’s standing right behind him when he says silkily, ‘No point crying over the proverbial.’

He’s just leaning in to kiss the back of Illya’s neck as he whirls, gasps in pain, whimpers involuntarily, and levels Napoleon with a glare that could kill.

‘You’re lucky I didn’t take your head off.’

‘With those arms, I’d like to see you try. Be careful. I don’t want you fainting. Never mind about the jug.’

‘I happened to like that milk jug.’

Napoleon regards the broken ceramic segments scattered over the floor.

‘Well, I didn’t. I think Aunt Amy got it from an incredibly exclusive boutique somewhere off Madison Square Park, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hated it. It must have cost her a hundred dollars. Maybe next Christmas I should redirect her presents to you, huh?’

‘A hundred dollar _milk jug_?’ Illya’s voice is almost a squeak. ‘You have a hundred dollar milk jug in your refrigerator? ’

‘Yeah, well, I was hoping it would get broken...’

It’s odd how blue eyes can look so alight with flame.

‘You didn’t think you could perhaps sell it and give the proceeds to the needy? To the children who struggle for medical care or the homeless on the streets?’

Napoleon just stares at him, and Illya mutters something in Russian that sounds very like  _ American capitalism... _

Napoleon pushes at one of the curving shards with his foot and sets it rocking. It makes a little ticking noise on the hard floor.

‘What were you trying to do, my little broken bird?’

Illya’s glare is still lethal but it rolls off Napoleon like water.

‘I should think one could deduce that from the evidence, Sherlock.’

Napoleon smiles, even though Illya’s face is still like thunder. ‘Ah. Elementary, my dear Kuryakin. You were trying to get yourself a cup of morning tea, and you found out – ’

Illya glances painfully at the arm that’s hanging out of the sling. His muscles have winnowed and his hand looks white. It’s like a broken wing.

‘That I can’t even manage the weight of a pint of milk.’

‘That you’re living in my apartment so _I_ can make you tea, my dear. Now, what would you like? Tea? Toast? Eggs, sunny side up?’

‘Tea,’ Illya says, and he still sounds tense and tired and angry. ‘Just tea.’

Gently Napoleon helps him to get his arm back into the sling. Gently he gives Illya the kiss he meant to give him at the start, touching his lips to his cheek and not expecting Illya to respond. He doesn’t respond.

‘I’ll put some ice packs on it when you’ve had your breakfast,’ he says. ‘You can have your painkillers now. Do you think you can stand a shower?’

‘I’m tired,’ Illya says, and Napoleon purses his lips. When Illya is so deep in this mood wrought of pain and poor sleep and frustration, there’s almost no wheedling him out of it. Illya stalks out of the room and Napoleon regards the pool of milk, the broken curves of that hideous jug, the hole that’s still in his cupboard door. Perhaps it’s a good thing Illya can’t use his arms, or he would have no crockery left at all.

He’s in the sitting room, turning on the television with his nose, changing the channel with his nose, little insistent butts that make him wince. Nothing on the television seems to please him. He makes noises of derision as he goes through variety shows, dramas, soaps. Finally he leaves it on a nature documentary and goes to sit on the couch, his face still a dramatic representation of thunder. As black and white gibbons swing through black and white trees he winces and closes his eyes.

Napoleon leaves him to it and whistles overtly as he potters around the kitchen making the tea and scrambling eggs. He slips a few slices of toast under the grill and the scent of the bread makes a warmth in the room. When he takes the tray through Illya glances at it and grunts and says, ‘I told you, just tea.’

‘You need to eat so you can take your pills,’ Napoleon says rationally. ‘Doctor’s orders, yes?’

He knows it will help when he has something in his stomach. He lifts the cup of tea to Illya’s lips and the first swallow seems to melt him a little. He offers him a forkful of eggs, and Illya chews and swallows, and his eyes slip to the rest on the tray despite himself. He eats resentfully, but at least he eats, and when Napoleon brings him his painkillers he swallows them with obvious relief.

‘So, how are you doing?’ he asks Illya, half-hopeful that the promise of pain relief will have lightened his mood.

Illya grunts. ‘I’m in pain when I’m asleep. I’m in pain when I’m awake. I dream about being in pain, when I’m asleep long enough for REM sleep. How do you think I’m doing?’

Napoleon sighs. ‘I thought you might be doing better with something in your stomach,’ he says. ‘I guess we need to wait for the painkillers to kick in.’

‘What _we_ is this, Napoleon?’ Illya asks, and his voice is so icy, so cutting, that Napoleon is robbed of words to respond with. He shoves Illya’s plate a little on the tray and puts his cup of tea on the table, leaving the straw beside it, lying flat on the wood. Then he takes the tray back into the kitchen and slides the plate onto the counter with the rest of the washing up, and just breathes.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon is fussing around him again. He makes a good nurse, would make a good nurse, if it weren’t for the fact that Illya hates to be nursed. He hates to need nursing. He hates being incapable and brought low by the demands of a body that won’t behave as it should. It’s a funny little limbo, being here in Napoleon’s apartment, but he hates not being at home and not having everything he needs at his fingertips. He feels like a trapped and wounded animal, getting up and pacing, pacing, wandering around the apartment in search of something, but he doesn’t know what. But getting up and pacing makes his shoulders hurt more, and he’s tired, so whenever he starts moving around with that restless itch he feels as though the minutes are counting down until he will be forced into rest again.

He stands scanning Napoleon’s bookshelves. Napoleon has so many books. Books on philosophy, books on the history of the tea clipper, on nautical protocol, on types of knots. He has novels in French and English, and a couple in Spanish that Illya knows for a fact he can’t read. He even has War and Peace in Russian, and it’s definite he can’t read that. He has books on gastronomy and astronomy and the upper echelons of New York society, and about Rennie Mackintosh design and the Scottish Enlightenment and the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci.

Nothing on physics. Nothing at all. There’s no point in staring at Napoleon’s bookshelves because he has so many books, but the books Illya wants are in his own apartment. He wants his journals and Kaplan’s Nuclear Physics and he wants to read that new book he bought about communication in the insect world. He remembers how when he was hanging he hadn’t been able to remember if fleas have wings. How ridiculous. Their Latin name is  _ Siphonaptera, _ of course, and it’s obvious from that that they don’t have wings. But he was distracted, he supposes, while he was hanging. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was hallucinating and breaking down, his mind wandering all over the place. He was hardly human any more.

He has to force his eyes to focus on the spines of the books because he’s drifting, and it’s dangerous to drift into those memories. They start to consume him. That’s why he’s looking at these books, searching for something to occupy himself with. But he doesn’t want ridiculous tomes on social etiquette and boating and art. Napoleon’s shelves are the reflection of a privileged upper class capitalist consumer. They are the books of a man who has grown up snug in the knowledge that no matter how anyone else fares, he’s okay.

‘Korea must have been such a shock to someone like you,’ Illya says, to cut off Napoleon’s asking if he needs anything and fussing about when he last had painkillers and saying he ought to sit down.

Napoleon takes a step back, because Illya’s tone was anything but friendly.

‘Er – it was something of a departure from the usual,’ he says, and his voice has that dangerous edge in it too. Korea isn’t a subject that Napoleon likes to be pushed on. Illya knows that. That’s why he’s pushing him.

‘Yes, it’s a long way from débutante’s balls and silver service and knowing that daddy’s always got your back,’ Illya says. ‘It must be odd coming from a country that feels the need to press its nose into everyone else’s business so frequently, and is always so insufferably  _ right – _ at least in its own eyes.’

It’s wrong. He knows it’s wrong. He knows that Napoleon isn’t like that. But he says it anyway.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says softly, in a voice so soft it’s like the touch of death. ‘You’re not the only little boy who had a hard life, you know.’

‘A hard life,’ Illya mutters. The anger is roiling inside him. It needs to come out. ‘I suppose you felt very powerful, shipped in to Korea with your M1 Garand and all your buddy boys in their nice uniforms and Uncle Sam behind you, urging you on.’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says again, dangerously, but it’s rising in Illya, it’s something to hold onto inside. He can’t hold anything with his hands but he can hold on to anger and resentment. He can hold on so hard to anger and resentment.

‘How many of the unarmed peasantry did you kill, Napoleon?’ Illya asks.

‘Maybe more than a skinny little Russian boy whose city couldn’t hold back the Nazis,’ Napoleon replies. His voice is so soft it’s like midnight darkness.

Sometimes the memory of the war is like a cloak coming down over him. It envelops and stifles him. The scent of smoke always bitter in the air. The beautiful buildings that had been his friends reduced to rubble and charred beams. He remembers coming across a book in the street, a book with half its pages gone and tide-marked with damp and printed with the unmistakeable mark of a German soldier’s boot. That one sight. That had cut into his heart in a curious way, a way he can’t quite understand now. He had stood in the street and wept at the sight of that book, sobbing in the way only a child can, and his mother had dragged him on by the hand, and he had felt like he was losing everything, his father, his books, his home, his friends, his life.

He remembers the drone of aircraft. He remembers the staccato bark of guns, looking down a street just in time to see a body crumple and the grey-clad men lower their weapons, and that person there – not dead. God, that person wasn’t dead. She was just lying there, twitching like a mouse savaged by a cat, making such a strange noise, and one of the soldiers had walked up to her and put the barrel of his long rifle against the back of her skull, and there had been one more savage shot, and she was still. She was still because her head was destroyed, her brain leaking out and scattered on the dull ground, half her skull in potsherds, and her spine, something of her spine, a raw piece of butcher’s offal protruding near where the back of her skull had been.

How he had wanted to kill them. How he had wished he had a uniform and boots and a gun, and hadn’t been a little boy, nothing but a little, helpless boy standing there, ears ringing with the sound of the shots, desperate to run but unable to move, as if someone had filled his feet with lead. He must have made a sound, because they turned and looked at him, and one of them raised his rifle and pointed it straight at his head. But then he laughed and he lowered the gun, and they all turned and walked up the street, walking past him, and one of them ruffled his hair with his hand as if he were a father, an uncle, a family friend, and they left him staring at that ruin of a woman on the ground, and when he vomited he vomited onto his front and his shoes, and then he cried because his mother would have to wash his clothes all over again.

‘Soldiers are butchers,’ he says very clearly and concisely, and Napoleon turns and walks out of the room.

Illya stands with his eyes focussed on all those bourgeois books because he is fixed to the floor again, fixed by lead like he had been in Kyiv, so full of feeling that he can’t move. He hears the clack of a glass being put down on the coffee table and then he hears the front door open and close, and he knows that Napoleon has gone.

He stands there, seething, shaking, so full of  _ feelings  _ that he can’t even quantify. Who ever said that feelings should have names? What the hell are these feelings anyway? Is he really angry because Napoleon had a privileged upbringing, because he was a soldier in Korea? Is he really angry because he was a helpless child in Kyiv and saw terrible things? And who is privileged really? Napoleon, the slave to capitalism, brainwashed into believing in the greatness of a country where only those with money thrive, or himself, brought up with just enough food and a place to live in and healthcare when it was needed, culture for all, and education piled on education piled on education?

He turns around from the bookshelves, his feet finally allowing him to move, and he lowers himself down onto the sofa, lowers himself stiffly when he wants to slump, because he can’t slump, can’t jar his shoulders, can’t risk the pain.

There is a tumbler of whiskey there, heavy-bottomed, over half full, with a straw sticking out of it. He leans forward, and his shoulders sear, and he takes a sip. It is rich and startling in his mouth, slipping over his tongue and down his throat and into his empty stomach.

Is he really angry at Napoleon for serving in the Korean war? He wasn’t shooting unarmed women and pointing his rifle at little boys. Not Napoleon. He wouldn’t have done that. Is he angry because his father disappeared for years and came back thin and ragged and somehow changed? Is he angry because those awful men in grey took over his home city? No. Not now, not with the raw, searing pain like a scab being ripped from a wound. Just because something haunts one it doesn’t mean that he falls into uncontrollable anger over it twenty five years after the fact.

It’s his shoulders. It’s his damn shoulders, and the constant, constant pain. He understands how even granite can be worn to sand when it is continually smashed by the waves. It’s the memory of the hours and hours and hours hanging from his wrists, just hanging in dark and in silence, with nothing but pain to keep him company, nothing but the endless revolutions of pain and fear and abject loneliness in his mind. The fear of death is like Chinese water torture in a situation like that, drip, drip, dripping in one’s mind. He can’t shake the feeling of it, can’t shake the memory.

He sucks another strawful of the whiskey, and exhales long and hard, and closes his eyes. He wishes he could slump back. He can either lean back or he can drink, and right now it’s the drink he needs.

His shoulders ache and throb and little skewers of pain run through them. It’s amazing how many different types of pain there are, and how they can all be present at once. Beside the pain, around the pain, is the fear. The fear is like a cloak around him, like a weight piled on his chest. What if his shoulders never heal? What if he can never use his arms again? What if he recovers some movement, but he’s always in pain and always incapable of basic things? He had feared death when he was hanging in the château. Now he fears life.

If only he could get the top off the whiskey bottle he would dip the straw into it and suck straight from there, like a baby suckling milk until it is drunk on the goodness. Napoleon has given him a good measure; two good measures in one glass, really, but he could take more. It’s good, he supposes, that Napoleon only gave him that much, and probably put the bottle back in the drinks cabinet that Illya can’t open with his hands as they are. The alcohol magnifies the effect of the painkillers and the painkillers magnify the effect of the alcohol, and he feels slurred and soft just from the sips he’s taking through the straw. He sucks until the straw gurgles and hisses and then he sighs and rests back and closes his eyes.

What if his arms never heal? What if he’s never whole again?

  


((O))

  


Napoleon opens the door like a parent checking on a sleeping child, inch by inch, his breath held in, his head just peeking around the edge. Illya is there on the sofa, the whiskey glass empty on the table in front of him, his head tilted back on the cushions and his mouth a little open in sleep. Napoleon tiptoes in and he isn’t sure if he’s being careful of not waking Illya because he is asleep, or because he doesn’t want to face his cutting anger again.

The whiskey glass is empty, the straw leaning up against the side. He’s rather relieved to see that the spirits cabinet is still closed. He doesn’t think Illya could manage the key anyway, and he usually wouldn’t drink himself stupid, but right now he isn’t quite sure. He just isn’t completely sure.

He stands there for a moment with the door closed behind him and a bag of groceries in his arms, just looking at Illya. He is so beautiful. Seeing him lying there, slack in sleep, so compact and trim and perfect, makes the shivers start all over again deep in his belly. But it’s not easy to forget the cutting, sarcastic, cold tone that Illya uses with him when he’s angry. What had he said?  _ How many of the unarmed peasantry did you kill? _

He remembers Korea so well, too well. He remembers standing in that foreign land, in that humid heat, holding a gun in his hands. Korea had been the first time he had held a gun in anger. And he hadn’t even been angry, had he? Not at first. He hadn’t harboured ill will towards the people of that land. He had just gone where he was sent, done what he had been told to do. Just like he does now, he had gone where he was sent and done what he had been told to do.

He sees a little slit of blue between Illya’s eyelids. Illya blinks his eyes open and goes as if to rub the sleep from them, and winces and subsides because his arms are tied around his body. In that little moment of movement his sleep-flushed face goes pale.

‘Hi,’ Napoleon says, and Illya is silent for a moment, blinking, but then he replies almost shyly, ‘Hi.’

Napoleon crosses to the sideboard and picks up Illya’s painkillers and unscrews the lid.

‘It’s time for your pills. Are you going to be a good boy and take them?’

‘Yes,’ Illya says quietly, and although he isn’t apologising, there is apology in his tone.

‘All right,’ Napoleon says, and he fetches a glass of water and pops the pills into Illya’s mouth and helps him drink. There is a bead of water left behind on Illya’s lower lip, and Napoleon touches it with a fingertip, breaking the surface tension and letting it spread between Illya’s skin and his.

‘It must have been hard in Kiev during the war,’ he says quietly.

‘It must have been hard in Korea,’ Illya says. ‘How old were you?’

‘Too young,’ Napoleon replies. He goes and gets out the whiskey bottle and slumps down beside Illya on the sofa and says, ‘Too damn young.’

He sits in silence and Illya is silent too. Then Napoleon asks, ‘If soldiers are butchers, what are spies?’

‘We’re agents,’ Illya says. ‘Spies are on the other side.’

‘Ahh,’ Napoleon says knowingly, because he does know exactly what Illya means. Spies are low down, dirty, despicable creatures. Agents are rather noble.

Illya grunts a kind of laugh. It really is quite absurd.

Napoleon pours Illya another measure of whiskey and pours out his own into Illya’s empty water glass. He takes a slug, and lifts Illya’s glass to his lips so he can take a proper mouthful instead of the annoying amount that will flow through the diameter of a straw.

‘Ahh,’ Illya says after he swallows, and Napoleon lifts a finger to wipe a bead of whiskey from his lip this time, and he licks the little drop from his fingertip and feels like he’s tasting Illya as well as the drink.

‘I’m sorry,’ Illya says eventually, distantly, looking at the opposite wall instead of at Napoleon. That’s all he says, but it’s enough.

‘Turn your head,’ Napoleon says. ‘If you can.’

Illya turns his head stiffly so that he’s looking at Napoleon. His lips are still a little moist with the whiskey, and his hair is ruffled, and he looks tired and cast down. Ever so carefully Napoleon leans in, awkwardly avoiding any part of him touching Illya’s shoulders, and he kisses his rich lips. He tastes his mouth and runs his tongue over the smoothness of Illya’s teeth.

‘You taste very good. Did you know that?’ Napoleon says when the kiss ends.

Illya’s pupils are dilated and he doesn’t know if it’s from the kiss or the drink or the painkillers, or all of those things. Illya’s eyes are amazing when his pupils are dilated to deep black pools, and his irides are just thin rims of blue around the edge.

‘I expect I taste like any other man,’ Illya says. ‘Most people are alike in the more basic ways.’

‘No,’ Napoleon says, and he is risking getting poetic but he says it anyway. ‘You taste of yourself. Only yourself. Some boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy dog tails. You’re made of slivovitz and snow and the steppes and – ’

‘And matryoshka dolls and a soot stained samovar and Siberian salt?’ Illya asks sceptically. ‘Really, Napoleon, I am Homo Sapiens just like you and at the moment my mouth tastes of saliva and bacteria and whiskey. Nothing more.’

Napoleon traces a finger down Illya’s cheek. He hasn’t drunk enough to explain the feelings inside that make him want to compare Illya’s hair to Russian wheat fields and his eyes to the depths of Lake Baikal. He hasn’t drunk enough to explain why when he looks at Illya’s lips he thinks of roses in snow. He hasn’t drunk enough to explain why he can forgive Illya for all his cutting words.

‘Well, I’d like to taste more of that saliva and bacteria and whiskey, anyway,’ he says.

‘The tasting is good,’ Illya admits. ‘But I’m very sore and very tired, so if you don’t mind me lying down in bed while you taste me, and the risk of me falling asleep...’

‘Come to bed,’ Napoleon says. ‘I can taste you another time. Come to bed, and I’ll stay with you while you sleep.’

  


((O))

  


In bed Illya lies out flat with his head on the pillow and his eyes staring up at the ceiling. He is too tired to sleep, in too much pain to sleep. Napoleon lies beside him but it’s as if he doesn’t quite dare touch him. He wishes that he would, but he doesn’t know how to say those words. He doesn’t know how to ask or plead for that touch, but he wants it. He remembers hanging and hanging, and being so alone, being so afraid of dying like that, never being touched again.

He’s lying in his unbuttoned shirt and his trousers are off, his underwear on, because that was the easiest thing to do. It hurts so much to take his shirt off every time he rests in the day, so Napoleon just unbuttons it for him and gently slips his trousers off, and then Illya lies down like that, a ridiculous figure, he thinks, and tries to sleep.

He turns his head and his neck aches. He wonders if he could lie on his front, his arms out of their slings, and Napoleon could rub his neck. He wonders if he could stand that. The slings make his neck ache and the pain in his shoulders makes his neck ache. But he turns his head and regards Napoleon’s face. Napoleon is sitting up a little on his side of the bed, a book in his hands, but Illya is almost sure he’s not reading. He hasn’t turned a page for five minutes.

‘Could you rub my neck?’ Illya asks, and his voice is tentative, because he knows he’s asking something of a man he has deeply upset and wronged.

Napoleon makes a little startled movement, and looks up from his book.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ he says.

‘My eyes weren’t closed. Can you help me to lie on my front?’

It’s a delicate operation, releasing his slings and easing off his shirt, and then letting Napoleon help him to lay himself out on his front. Napoleon has to take almost all his weight and lower him down, because he can’t just roll over. But then he’s lying there, Napoleon kneeling beside him. Napoleon is warming scented oil in his palms, and then he touches Illya’s neck ever so softly. His fingers are like a blessing from God. They are firm and strong and ease into the knots in Illya’s neck and gently rub them into softness. Illya can’t help but make little moans and sighs of gratification, because it’s just so good.

Napoleon’s fingers slip in the oil and jab into a tender spot, and Illya cries out involuntarily.

‘Sorry,’ Napoleon mutters. ‘Sorry.’

He leans down to drop a kiss onto the place that he hurt, and even though Illya knows Napoleon’s lips are gentle, he flinches, and the flinch hurts.

‘You’re too tense,’ Napoleon says. ‘Why don’t you let me give you a shot?’

‘No,’ Illya murmurs. ‘I’ve had too much morphine.’

He doesn’t want to get addicted. He fears addiction almost more than the pain.

A flash comes over him again. Hanging in the chains, his wrists burning beyond endurance, his body so tired, his arms so tired. Using all of his strength to fold himself up, to bring his legs higher and higher. He is trying to balance, bringing his trembling arms out like a gymnast using the rings, bringing his legs and his body upwards until he is almost in a handstand. Almost, almost –

And his weight unbalances and suddenly he is falling, his whole body weight falling and caught by nothing more than the chains around his wrists. The crack like breaking ice in his wrist is eclipsed entirely by the pain in his shoulders, a nuclear explosion of pain billowing out until it inhabits his entire body. Tears seep into the blindfold around his eyes and the pain pushes, pushes, until everything is white and gone and he’s no longer there.

‘Hey, Illya.’

Napoleon is stroking the hair at the back of his head, stroking it very gently, and he grows aware of the mattress under him and the scent of the oil and the warmth of the room. He isn’t hanging in a château in Belgium. He’s here in Napoleon’s apartment, lying on his front on the bed, his breath coming fast and the pain shooting in little jerks through shoulders and back and neck.

‘You okay?’ Napoleon asks.

‘Yes,’ he murmurs, because it feels shameful to say that he’s assailed by flashbacks that take over and erase the present reality that he’s living in. It feels shameful to admit that he’s so terribly affected by what happened. Of course Napoleon knows these things. He’s there when he wakes from nightmares and there when he comes out of counselling sessions and there when the memories and pain and fear coalesce into a raging anger that makes Napoleon its target. But it feels shameful to admit to that.

‘Of course you’re not,’ Napoleon says, and Illya replies snappishly, ‘Well, why did you ask?’

‘Hey,’ Napoleon says. ‘Hackles down, okay? I asked because I’m worried about you. Now try to relax or this rubbing won’t get anywhere.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Illya murmurs, mouth half against the sheet. ‘I’m – ’

‘Tired,’ Napoleon finishes for him.

‘Tired,’ Illya echoes. ‘And – I don’t know. I can’t shake it, Napoleon. I keep remembering it...’

‘No one expects you to shake it. Not this soon.’

‘Even with all the counselling...’

‘ _ Especially  _ with all the counselling. What do you expect, Illya, bringing it up every other day and talking about it for so long? It’s going to be better in the long run, but not right now. Everything’s raw.’

Yes, everything is raw. The memories are raw and the pain is half raw, half old and burning soreness. It’s such a mixture of pain, that comes in peaks and aches and heat and sudden stabs and long, lingering, throbbing soreness. It never leaves him alone and never lets him forget.

Napoleon’s hands touch his back again, a delicate touch between his shoulder blades, slick with fresh, warm oil. Illya closes his eyes and tries to feel only Napoleon’s fingers working, only feel that slow easing of the knotted aches.

‘Sometimes I think it would have been easier if they’d just shot me,’ Illya says after a while of just lying there, letting Napoleon’s fingers soothe him.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Napoleon says automatically. ‘It’s never better to be dead.’

Illya huffs out breath. Sometimes he feels as if it would have just been so much easier for them to put a lid on it there and then. A very quick pain, and then nothing. Peace, instead of this drawn out agony. Peace, instead of those days of hanging and his mind churning and churning and his body drying out and his bowels emptying and his being winnowing down to a husk that consisted of nothing but fear and pain.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says. ‘You’re not dead. You’re healing.’

‘Am I?’ Illya asks, and his voice is unsteady. ‘Napoleon, what if I  _ don’t _ heal? What if I never heal enough to get back to work, or to use my arms again?’

‘You  _ are _ healing,’ Napoleon says again, and Illya gets the feeling from his tone that Napoleon isn’t sure of what will happen either.

‘And if I don’t heal enough?’

That question has been teetering on his tongue for days now. What it he never heals enough?

Napoleon gives a long sigh. He’s quiet for a moment, his fingers just moving on Illya’s neck, pressing the tension out of one particular knot. Illya closes his eyes and just feels Napoleon’s fingers, smells the scent of the clean sheets and the oil, feels the cotton against his face.

‘Well,’ Napoleon says, ‘there’s a lot more to life than being an agent. There are a lot of roles in U.N.C.L.E. beyond being an agent, and that’s just the start of it. You could go back to academia, couldn’t you?’

Illya huffs a little laugh. ‘Become a crippled professor of nuclear physics? Aren’t those usually the types that end up on Thrush’s side?’

‘Well,’ Napoleon says lightly, ‘it’s a consideration. Have you ever thought of being an arch villain? Their hiring policies seem rather broader than ours.’

‘You mean they take the sick and the lame and the blind?’ Illya asks.

The pain is there like a shadow lying over him. It never goes away. Even with the bliss of Napoleon massaging his neck, the pain still never goes away. He could incandesce with rage at those people for doing that to him, but he can’t push away the pain for long enough to let the rage coalesce into any real physical form.

‘You’ll get better,’ Napoleon says. ‘You will.’

‘You don’t  _ know _ that,’ Illya snaps suddenly, because he’s so tired of well people telling him that he will heal. No one knows. No one really knows.

Napoleon’s hands stop rubbing. He lays them lightly on Illya’s back so he just feels the heat and gentleness of them.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t know that, and you don’t know that, and the doctors don’t know that. But we’re doing all we can.’

‘I know,’ Illya murmurs against the sheet.

He feels something soft against the nape of his neck. Napoleon’s lips are there, kissing him gently where his spine becomes his neck, his breath warm and moist over his skin. He gives kiss after kiss, little gentle touches. He helps Illya ever so carefully to turn onto his back, and he leans down to kiss his lips, softly, hardly touching at first, but then pressing harder, more needfully. His tongue flickers against Illya’s lips, and they part, allowing that heat in, and he tastes the delicacy of Napoleon’s mouth. For a little while, although his shoulders still hurt, he stops thinking about the future and stops thinking about the past, and all there is is the feeling of Napoleon kissing him. He lies there, eyes closed, as Napoleon’s lips move down to his neck, his adam’s apple, the little hollow of his sternum. They kiss the exquisitely sensitive flesh about his nipples and then his lips and tongue trace the line of his ribs, and then move to the shivering flatness about his navel. Illya shifts his hips and sighs, and Napoleon gently peels his underwear a little way down his legs and then the kisses are falling on the soft cowl of his cock and his tongue is flickering there, and his fingers are touching the velvet of his balls, and he sighs again and lets his thighs fall apart.

  


((O))

  


Afterwards he is warm and content, utterly boneless. The pain throbs in his shoulders, but somehow his spine is relaxed. Napoleon is sitting on the bed beside him with the smile of the Cheshire cat, as if he has just consumed the most delicious of creams. There is hardly a thought in his head. He lies and sees the ceiling above him and sees Napoleon and sees, peripherally, pictures on the walls and the top of the door frame into the other room. Nothing of him moves apart from the beating of his heart and the rhythmical shiver of his skin in response.

Napoleon strokes fingertips down his chest and asks, ‘Are you feeling a little more relaxed now, comrade?’

‘I don’t know what I’m feeling,’ Illya murmurs.

He’s conscious that the pleasure has all been his, that Napoleon has given to him utterly without receiving anything in return. But he doesn’t have the urge to move at all, and Napoleon doesn’t seem to mind.

Napoleon kisses his own fingertips and touches those fingertips to Illya’s lips.

‘Go to sleep for a while,’ he says. ‘I have some work to do. If you’re up to it later maybe we can go out, get some fresh air. But sleep for a while, okay? I’ll be in my study.’

‘All right,’ Illya replies, lips hardly moving, eyes half closed.

He feels as if he’s already asleep. There is the pain, low and dull and pulsing in his shoulders, but everything is so relaxed that it hardly matters. He doesn’t feel alone and he doesn’t feel angry and he doesn’t feel as if there is no hope. Through half-closed eyes he watches Napoleon stand up and move towards the door, and the warm feeling of sleep creeps over him like night stealing over the world. He doesn’t even hear the words that Napoleon speaks as he steps through the doorway, because by then he is already warm and deep in sleep.


End file.
